On the first day of the first day, the fifth day rises and burns incense and cannons. Eat pepper and cypress wine, eat water snacks (i.e. dumplings). Or secretly wrapped silver money one or two inside, the winner of the one year old auspicious, is the day also greeted each other, the name of the new year also. ——Liu Ruoyu, "Zhi Zhongzhi"
preface
The sound of firecrackers in addition to the old age, for Chinese, the Spring Festival is one of the most important traditional festivals. The northern region has always had the custom of eating dumplings for the New Year, and it can be learned in some ancient books that even the New Year in the imperial palace is to eat dumplings. It is said that dumplings originated in the Eastern Han Dynasty, which has a history of more than 1800 years, and archaeologists have found Tang Dynasty dumplings among the Tang Dynasty cultural relics unearthed in Xinjiang.
Thousands of years ago, Turpan also popular to eat dumplings
In the ancient tombs of the Tang Dynasty in the Turpan area of Xinjiang, something shaped like dumplings was found in the burial items, and compared with the dumplings that people eat now, the shape is also crescent-shaped, but the dumplings that people eat now are slightly smaller. Through archaeological findings, it can be proved that as early as the Tang Dynasty Turpan region had the habit of eating dumplings.
In people's impression, dumplings have always been a traditional snack of the Han people, dumpling food was found in the Turpan region of Xinjiang, which is enough to prove that in the Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago, dumplings have been introduced to the western region through some channels, and they are very popular, which shows that there were also some exchanges in food culture at that time.
It has high research value
Among the dumplings unearthed in Turpan, Xinjiang, 2 dumplings are very well preserved, and after expert research, it was found that the outer skin of this dumpling is wheat flour, but the filling part is difficult to distinguish because it has dried over time, and even so, the discovery of these dumplings is also of great significance for the study of the eating habits of the ancients and the development of agriculture.
In fact, dumplings have been found in ancient tombs more than once in the Xinjiang region, and dumplings were also excavated in the three bridge cemeteries in Shanshan County in 1990, and these dumplings are older than the dumplings in the ancient tombs of the Tang Dynasty, dating back to the Wei and Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties, which is also the earliest archaeological discovery of dumplings so far. Food is also a kind of culture, and changes in eating habits are of great significance for studying local history. In addition to being able to explain that dumplings were introduced to Xinjiang from the Central Plains at that time, there is also a possibility that the ancients migrated and brought eating habits to Xinjiang.
Reasonable speculation about the dumpling filling of the Tang Dynasty
In the excavated Xinjiang dumplings, people will still be curious about what kind of dumplings were eaten by the Tang Dynasty, and by studying the eating habits of the Tang Dynasty and the crops planted in the Turpan region of Xinjiang at that time, archaeologists have made reasonable reasoning about the filling of the dumplings, giving several combinations of dumpling fillings with high probabilities.
The ancient aquaculture industry was not developed, so it was not so easy to eat meat, so the dumpling filling was mainly vegetarian filling. The more common vegetables on the table of the Tang Dynasty that are suitable for filling are: celery, leeks, sunflowers, radishes, turnips and cabbage. At that time, the amount of cabbage cultivation was not high, even if cabbage dumplings were deeply loved by modern people, but in the Tang Dynasty, it was impossible to make dumplings stuffed with cabbage.
summary
Food culture is constantly evolving, but some things have also maintained traditions, and the tradition of eating dumplings for the New Year has been passed down to this day. It's just that the dumplings now have a lot of changes in the filling compared with the ancient times, but the only constant is people's expectations for reunion and the new year.
【References】《Discretionary Chronicle》
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